The Emperor's Horn

Are we there yet?

20

JUL/15

Captain Grinalt gave the order and for the next hour, as had happened a dozen times before, hymns boomed out through the ship’s vox-casters while the crew stood alert and fervently sung praises to the God-Emperor. Meanwhile, deep in the belly of the ship, work-teams prepared to bring the great Warp Drives on-line.
On the Captain’s command, the Emperor’s Horn left reality and instantaneously plunged into the immaterium, while not as disconcerting as the experience once was, the event still causes that sicking feeling in the pit of the stomach no one ever truly gets used to. Avoiding the aetheric reefs and other dangers of this realm was largely on the shoulders of the Navigator, so the explorers spent their months during the voyage to Footfall trying to figure out just what it was exactly they had found.
All of the artifacts retrieved from the manor appeared to be Yu’vath in nature. The statue that Thanin had detected an energy source in was first suspected of being some sort of weapon, but careful testing found it to be a sort of protective cask. When opened, it projected a 3D hologram of odd hieroglyphics consisting of circles and lines that did not look at all consistent with known Yu’vath imagery.
Many of the books and papers that the explorers took along with the statues were notes and notebooks of the tech-priest. Bits and pieces of the information needed were scattered throughout the stacks and stacks of papers. The explorers were able to put together that the hologram image was found thousands of years ago by the warp worshiping Yu’vath and predated them by untold millennium. It seems the dark sorcerers of the Yu’vath had also tried to unlock it’s secrets and the tech-priest dedicated his years on Grace Prime to discover what the Yu’vath had learned and obvious from his notes, driving him increasingly more insane.
The break through for the explorers came when Thanin discovered sheets put aside by the others as as scribbles made by a madman were actually representations of sounds made in the Tecna-Lingua language of the Adeptus Mechanicus! The tech priest believed part of the hologram to contain a map of an area that is now in the Calixis Sector, unrecognizable because it predates even the formation of some of the stars. He narrowed down the maps Terminus to an area of five stars and had since eliminated one possibility, Acreage. The remaining possibilities were: Kudrun, Solace, Tsade and Zumthor. The purpose of the map remains unknown but being of a nearly incomprehensible age, it must be of staggering value! A major obstacle this map presents is that it leads in the Imperium, where a Rogue Trader is merely another subject of the God-Emperor (albeit a powerful one) and can not do as he pleases. Secrecy and cover would be needed as best case scenario getting caught could forfeit a warrant and worst, their very lives!